Hacker News: eleveriven

New comment by eleveriven in "How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues"

eleveriven — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:07:12 +0000

I like the idea of treating limewash as maintenance rather than a permanent cure. That is probably closer to how these materials were historically used anyway

New comment by eleveriven in "How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues"

eleveriven — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:04:49 +0000

This makes me want to see lime used more in ordinary homes

New comment by eleveriven in "How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers Clues"

eleveriven — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:02:56 +0000

Yet carbonation is not universally helpful

New comment by eleveriven in "Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:43:29 +0000

I think the problem is that these things can both be true. Pesticides can be a much bigger threat to native insects, while dense managed honeybee populations can still put extra pressure on native bees in some places

New comment by eleveriven in "Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:40:58 +0000

The hard part is probably that "native bees" are not a drop-in replacement for managed hives you can put on a truck and move between farms

New comment by eleveriven in "Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:38:10 +0000

I had no idea winter survival could come down to getting one brief warm spell at the right time so the colony can loosen up and move a few inches

New comment by eleveriven in "Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:36:05 +0000

Wow... And I think designing the hive so the bees' own grooming behavior is actually effective seems like a much better first line of defense

New comment by eleveriven in "Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:30:17 +0000

Spider venom saving bees was not on my bingo card, but this is genuinely cool. Obviously "works on mites in the lab" is a long way from "works safely and cheaply in a real hive", but varroa is such a nasty problem that even a new direction is worth paying attention to

New comment by eleveriven in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

eleveriven — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:50:28 +0000

In some ways the more interesting question might become whether Martian life, if found, shares the same basic biochemistry as Earth life

New comment by eleveriven in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

eleveriven — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:47:30 +0000

Maybe benevolent in the same way a heat-ray is a form of urban renewal

New comment by eleveriven in "More evidence is consistent with possible ancient life on Mars (2025)"

eleveriven — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:45:18 +0000

What I like about Mars stories like this is that they are a good antidote to both extremes: "we found life!" and "there is nothing interesting here"

New comment by eleveriven in "Microsoft rejects critical Azure vulnerability report, no CVE issued"

eleveriven — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:22:31 +0000

The most worrying part here is not even whether this specific issue deserved a CVE. It is the incentive structure.

New comment by eleveriven in "Apple vs. EU Commission: DMA second round"

eleveriven — Tue, 19 May 2026 07:09:17 +0000

The permission to intervene matters because otherwise this risks becoming a fight between Apple, the Commission, and a few large industry players

New comment by eleveriven in "Tesla Wall Connector bootloader bypasses the firmware downgrade ratchet"

eleveriven — Fri, 15 May 2026 05:28:22 +0000

It also fits the broader theme here: too much important behavior seems to live in the "application layer" of the charger, while the more durable source of truth is elsewhere.

New comment by eleveriven in "How ChatGPT serves ads"

eleveriven — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:10:24 +0000

This is funny, but also exactly why ads in a conversational assistant feel different from ads in search

New comment by eleveriven in "How ChatGPT serves ads"

eleveriven — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:46:34 +0000

The uncomfortable part is that "ads as a last resort" sounds very different once the product becomes one of the main places people ask for advice

New comment by eleveriven in "How ChatGPT serves ads"

eleveriven — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 12:34:10 +0000

The most interesting part to me is not that ads exist, but how invisible the boundary becomes

New comment by eleveriven in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:31:05 +0000

If you were around those circles, a lot of the "signals" in the article just look like the shared baseline culture rather than anything uniquely identifying

New comment by eleveriven in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:26:58 +0000

Also, Szabo's whole reputation comes from bit gold and years of writing about exactly these ideas

New comment by eleveriven in "Who is Satoshi Nakamoto? My quest to unmask Bitcoin's creator"

eleveriven — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 13:24:21 +0000

It's technically true, but it's also a very selective framing